States spend more on suicide prevention than they used to. Not where the deaths are.

Across 306 enacted state budgets for 2021-2026, states explicitly allocated $7.2 billion to suicide prevention and crisis services, rising from $1.05 to $6.55 per person. But 21.6% of state-years allocated nothing, and a state's suicide rate bore no relationship to what it budgeted.

The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline launched nationally in 2022, but the infrastructure behind it -- call centres, mobile crisis teams, stabilisation units -- is largely built and paid for by individual states. Researchers led by Jonathan Purtle read every enacted state budget for fiscal years 2021 through 2026, 306 in all, and counted the dollars explicitly labelled for suicide prevention and crisis services. The total was $7.2 billion, and the trend was up: mean per capita funding climbed from $1.05 in 2021 to $6.55 in 2025, with the share of total state budgets rising alongside it. Two findings complicate the good news. First, the spending is wildly uneven and often absent -- the median state-year allocated $0.87 per person, a fraction of the $3.63 mean, and in 66 of the 306 state-years, 21.6% of them, the figure was exactly zero. Second, and most striking, there was no significant association between a state's suicide death rate and how much it budgeted. Need, measured the most direct way available, did not predict funding. What did predict it was legislation: states that had enacted a 988 telecom fee, a small surcharge on phone bills, budgeted more than twice as much per person as states that had not ($7.73 versus $3.13), which the authors offer as a practical financing route. The study counts only money a budget explicitly labels for this purpose, so it undercounts the real total -- city and county funding, general mental health spending and Medicaid crisis services all sit outside it, and by amounts that likely differ state to state. It also counts dollars budgeted rather than dollars spent, and actual expenditure is usually lower. Because suicide rates were measured before each fiscal year, nothing here can say whether the additional money changed outcomes.